Christians and Their Homework!

[Angrboda]

Can the Ontological Argument be used to show the necessary existence of the maximally great unicorn?
Not at all! The great-making properties of the maximally great being are logically incompatible with the necessary properties of a unicorn, making the possibility of the maximally great unicorn’s existence untenable. If you reduce the great-making properties such that we arrive at the greatest possible unicorn, then it no longer has the properties which make its existence necessary in every possible world. Now, if you diminish the necessary properties of the unicorn such that this unicorn shares the same properties as the maximally great being, then that unicorn is in fact God, just going by a different name.

Is it possible for the maximally great being to exist?
In my view, this is the only premise of the Ontological Argument that can be reasonably attacked but from what I can tell, there has not been any successful objection to this premise. Some historical attempts include the Problem of Evil (the logical version of which has been resolved with the free will argument) and the omnipotence paradox (which is resolved by defining omnipotence to mean that God can do anything that is logically possible). It seems to me that the burden of proof is on the atheist to show that the maximally great being cannot logically exist.

The ontological argument is fatally flawed because the very notion of an objectively greatest anything is fundamentally incoherent. You likely have never heard of this counter-argument as it is my own invention. You can find out more about it from the discussion in the following thread.

...I've shown in the past that the notion of a greatest conceivable being is incoherent, though you didn't understand the last time so I'm not optimistic that explaining it again will help. When you say that God is the greatest conceivable being, you're saying that God has all the good [great -ed.] qualities. But goodness is a subjective judgement, so greatest possible being is a judgement made up of subjective judgements. For every subjective judgement that says X is a great making quality, there is an equally valid subjective judgement which says that X is a bad making quality. The reason is because qualities and properties are neither good or bad in and of themselves, they only become so when a subject attaches a value to them. You cannot construct a greatest anything out of properties that are inherently neutral. So "greatest conceivable being" has no meaning other than as a religious catchphrase.

https://atheistforums.org/thread-51825-p...pid1644388

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How can objective morality be grounded in God’s nature?
Because God is the maximally great being, part of that greatness entails moral perfection, and so morality is rightly grounded in God’s nature. This means that whatever is good is consistent with God’s nature. For example, justice is good because God’s nature is just and vice versa. And so, when I say that someone can do good without knowledge of God, what I mean is that they can act in accordance with one or more aspect of God’s nature without believing that God exists.

This doesn't even begin to answer the question. You need a complete metaphysical explanation of how God being morally perfect gives rise to objective moral values. Like most apologists, you just sort of jump from God being morally perfect to the conclusion that objective moral values exist as a consequence of his moral perfection. But that doesn't really connect the two together. You've skipped a bunch of necessary steps getting from one to the other. But I'm not surprised as many theists make similar non-arguments. You've simply swallowed their faulty logic without thinking about it. For example, one of the first steps is explaining what it means for something to be morally perfect. We typically ascribe moral goodness or badness to actions, not to any supposed "moral nature" of beings. Assuming the latter gives rise to such constructions as the belief that someone who never ever commits a bad act can still be considered to be morally evil, because you've asserted that people can have moral nature's whose properties are independent of their actions. That usage seems nonsensical and counter-intuitive, but you seem to have committed yourself to such usage by the nature of your argument. And that's just the beginning. You've got a long way to go to explain how a specific being, God, having a specific nature, good, gives rise to objective moral values. (Even if we skip over problems with assuming God is good, such as Euthyphro's dilemma. See the following post for an updated Euthyphro for the claim that God's nature is good, thereby eluding the traditional Euthyphro, here.)